The title of the first episode of the BBC's hit TV series Sherlock, starring
Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman has been announced.

As the third series of Sherlock goes into production, the series’ co-creator Mark Gatiss has revealed the title of the first episode. The Empty Hearse will kick off the three-part series which has been scheduled for transmission in late 2013.

Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories will no doubt deduce that The Empty Hearse takes its name from The Adventure of the Empty House, the story in which Conan Doyle famously brought Holmes back from the dead following the detective’s death plunge in The Final Problem.

At theend of the second series of Sherlock, we saw Watson (Martin Freeman) mourning at Sherlock’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) gravestone while the enigmatic detective looked on. We know that his body was not in the coffin when he was buried. Presumably, The Empty Hearse is a reference to what happened to the body after the fall and before the funeral.

Last week, Cumberbatch ended speculation that the third series would be the last, when he let slip that a fourth had been commissioned.